Who ruined Sarah Palin?
Chuck Todd noticed the tension between McCain and Palin first at the Network interview with the pair. After the Katie Couric fiasco, Grandpa showed up to hold lil Sarah's hand at the interview. Except it was the Palin who answered the questions, to the visible irritation McCain. Todd wondered if he was having second thoughts about the VP choice. Then Tom Ridge offered the helpful commentary that they would be leading in PA if only McCain had chosen--Tom Ridge. We haven't heard from Gov. Pawlenty yet.
h/t Ballerina X
Looks like Palin blames her handlers, mostly former Bush operatives, for her troubles. From Ben Smith:
"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
Is "rogue" like maverick in a $7000 suit?
Both McCain and Palin seem to be resenting their handlers. Back in August, it was the Bush operatives who took away McCain's telephone privileges. After Palin came on board, it has been a string of disasters. no wonder they are lashing out at Bush. But the delicious part is that Palin and McCain staffers are lashing out at each other too. This is the Obama Derangement Sundrome kicking in. Let us do all we can to fan the flames.
So who are the villains in Palin's eyes?
"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," said a McCain insider, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News's Katie Couric, whose sometimes-painful content the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.
It gets better.
"A number of Governor Palin's staff have not had her best interests at heart and they have not had the campaign's best interests at heart," fumed the McCain insider, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign.
So who is this unnamed insider? In any newspaper article, the people being quoted anonymously are usually those quoted on the record on some related matter, often in the next sentence. Especially if the anonymous comment flatters them.
Wallace declined to engage publicly in the finger-pointing that has consumed the campaign in the final weeks.
"I am in awe of [Palin's] strength under constant fire by the media," she said in an email. "If someone wants to throw me under the bus, my personal belief is that the most graceful thing to do is to lie there."
"Engage publicly". Interesting choice of phrase. So she only joins in anonymously in the finger-pointing?
McCain's people say that Palin was just too green, not ready for prime-time. Well, Duh. Who foisted this turnip on the national scene?
Some McCain aides say they had little choice with a candidate who simply wasn't ready for the national stage, and that Palin didn't forcefully object.Moments that Palin's allies see as triumphs of instinct and authenticity - the Wright suggestion, her objection to the campaign's pulling out of Michigan - they dismiss as Palin's "slips and miscommunications" - that is, her own incompetence, and evidence of the need for tight scripting.
Let us give equal time to the Palin's side. The more we hear from them before the campaign, the better.
Her strategy was to be trustworthy and a team player during the convention and thereafter, but she felt completely mismanaged and mishandled and ill advised," the person said. "Recently, she's gone from relying on McCain advisers who were assigned to her to relying on her own instincts."
Who is this unnamed person, reported to be outside the campaign, who is so helpfully defending Palin? Some of her other supporters are named:
her closest ally among her new traveling aides is a policy advisor, former National Security Council official Steve Biegun. She's also said to be close with McCain's chief foreign policy advisor. Randy Scheunemann, who prepared her for the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate.
Who is Palin's main handler? One Tracey Schmitt. She is the one that tried to stop Palin from talking to a NYTimes reporter.
The funniest bit in the article is this:
If McCain loses, Palin's allies say that the national Republican Party hasn't seen the last of her. Politicians are sometimes formed by a signal defeat - as Bill Clinton was when he was tossed out of the Arkansas governor's mansion after his first term - and Palin would return to a state that had made her America's most popular governor and where her image as a reformer who swept aside her own party's insiders rings true, if not in the cartoon version the McCain campaign presented.
Yes, folks, Sarah Palin is planning a comeback, following none other than Bill Clinton!
We know Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was our President for eight years. Governor, you are no Bill Clinton. Heck, you are not even Dan Quayle. At least, Dan paid for his own clothes.
The Obama Derangement Syndrome is spreading throughout the GOP apparatus. I predict that the first to recover will be John McCain. Just as Sen. Clinton understood her situation before any of her staff, McCain knows it is over.
In fact McCain could soon be an Obama ally in the Senate, where he will break with his Party to help Obama deal with the many crises facing the country. His main enemies in the GOP will be the evangelicals who will blame him for losing the election.
Sarah Palin will be the last to recover. Her sanity was tenuous to begin with, as is clear by the stalking of the brother-in-law. I doubt if she will quietly withdraw to Wasilla with her new wardrobe. She is deranged enough to think she has a future in National Politics.
I hope she hangs around. She is indeed a gift from God.